My Unfinished Guitar Lessons

After I finished my Visharad in Indian Classical Music, I wanted to learn something western. So when I came back home, after finishing college, I started learning guitar. My goal was to be able to sing while playing the guitar.

My instructor was a young man who played impeccable guitar. I wanted to play the guitar as good as him.  Soon I found out that he was a terrible singer. And he was also determined to learn to sing while playing the guitar. He had been requesting my former music teacher to accept him as a student for a long time but he kept saying no due to his busy schedule. I pulled some strings (pun unintended !!) and helped him enroll in my former music teacher's classes.

My guitar instructor used to have a class of about 6-7 students and a few of them were girls. I noticed that his behavior towards me was different than the other girls. He would be very serious with me, only talk about the guitar lessons, but with other girls he would be very friendly and funny. I thought maybe he was upset with me because I laughed at him every time he sang. But he was a bad singer, I couldn't help it. Then he'd just hum the song in a very low volume while teaching us the cords. 

Gradually, I thought maybe he feels intimidated by me because my former music teacher had been praising me and my singing a lot in front of him during his music classes. But then I thought why would he feel intimidated, I can sing well but I can't play the guitar as good as him. After a while, I stopped caring about his unusual behavior.

Then one day, he told me that he likes me. I could tell it took a lot of courage for him to say it to me. I was shocked. During those days, I was unable to handle such situations rationally. I was furious. I kept saying- "but I am your student. Even though we are almost the same age, I am still your student. (I found out later that he was a year younger than me and he knew that.) How can you say this to me?"- I didn't hear him out and just rushed out.

I never really felt bad about being so rude to him. Although, now I know how horrible it feels when you care about someone so much and they don't care about your feelings. I realize now that I must have traumatized him. I try to justify my behavior by thinking maybe he did this with every girl, or maybe not. I'll never know. 

I believe in Karma and I know it comes back to bite you in the rear. Well, I've had my share of bites. If I had told him the same thing without being angry, he wouldn't have been hurt so much.

I learned during my management classes, that your words only have 7% of the total impact during any communication, your body language and tone of voice has the remaining 93% of the impact (No Wonder!). I wish I knew this back then, I used to be notorious for my bad temper during those days. I still am, but now I am nice to everyone unless they really get on my nerves.

After this incident, I was sad for one reason that I had lost a perfectly good guitar teacher. After that I tried other guitar classes but none of them worked out for one reason or the other. I have forgotten whatever little I learned to play during that one year. However, I am still determined that I will learn to play guitar one day and sing my favorite song on it, and hopefully this time, nothing will ruin the learning process.